Counter Guide

How to Beat Briar

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Briar is the only champion in the game who gets harder to kill the closer she is to dying, and her ultimate means she picks the fight from anywhere on the map.

Certain Death [R] tags a champion from across the map and then Briar simply arrives, fears everyone standing near you, and refuses to stop. The part that makes it miserable is the bleed underneath it. Every attack she lands heals her, and the healing gets stronger the lower her health goes, so the health bar you've been chipping away at is the thing making her stronger. That's a real problem and it's worth checking the solo queue tier list before you decide the answer is to play better. The mechanical answer is grievous wounds and it's cheaper than you think.

Matchup Snapshot Briar, the Restrained Hunger

Where You Meet HerJungle

Damage TypePhysical

Why She Is FrustratingShe heals more as she gets lower

MobilityA leap, a charge and a global ultimate

Biggest ThreatCertain Death [R]

Hardest CounterRammus

What a Counter Needs

Grievous wounds bought early, because one bleed is the entire champion
A way to survive the first five seconds of Certain Death [R] instead of trying to out-damage it
Something that punishes attack speed: armor, thorns, or an attack speed slow

Patches 26.17-26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Briar on Patches 26.17-26.18

Best Picks Into Briar

Rammus2,662 games51.2%
Wukong4,020 games51.1%
Cho'Gath2,931 games51.0%

Picks Briar Beats

Rengar1,906 games42.1%
Qiyana1,888 games42.5%
Diana1,647 games43.2%
Nunu & Willump1,567 games43.8%

Win rates are for the champion listed, in the jungle against Briar. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patches 26.17-26.18, Silver and above, 127,802 Briar games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Briar Overview

Strengths: What Makes Her Dangerous

Dropping her to a sliver isn't the milestone it is against anyone else. Everything she does applies a bleed that heals her, and the healing gets bigger the lower she gets.
In a group fight she's hitting more than one person. Her frenzy adds attack speed and move speed, and splashes her attacks onto everything around whoever she's chewing on.
Certain Death [R] reaches essentially the whole map, beelines her to the marked champion, and fears everyone standing near them when she lands. You don't get to choose whether the fight happens.
Her opening move sets up her own damage, because the leap that starts the fight also stuns you and breaks your armor on the way in.
Chilling Scream [E] heals her for a portion of her maximum health while she charges it, reduces the damage she takes during the charge, and knocks you back at full charge. It's a heal, a defensive cooldown and a displacement on one button.

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

She has no innate health regeneration at all. Out of combat she recovers nothing, so a Briar who has been forced off a fight stays hurt.
Blood Frenzy takes her targeting away from her. While frenzied she chases the nearest enemy, so whoever's standing closest decides who she hits.
Chilling Scream [E] cancels her own frenzy. Every time she takes the heal she gives up the chase, and a good Briar has to keep choosing between the two.
All of her sustain runs through one bleed. Grievous wounds takes away the reason she's scary.
Her damage is basic attacks. Armor, attack speed reduction and damage reflection all land on the same part of the kit, so the items stack up fast.

Countering Briar

Based on the strengths and weaknesses above, beating Briar comes down to champions who can accomplish at least one of the following:

Buy grievous wounds before it feels necessary. Bramble Vest and Executioner's Calling are both cheap, and the champion falls apart without the healing.
Fight in open ground. A fully charged Chilling Scream [E] stuns whoever it slams into terrain, so the wall at your back belongs to her.
Let the frontline stand closest. Blood Frenzy sends her at the nearest enemy, and that's a decision your team gets to make before the fight starts.
Hold your hard CC until after she commits. She has three separate ways to close distance and only one health bar once she has used them.

If you're already locked into the matchup without any of those tools, these strategies still work:

Playing a Bad Briar Matchup

Buy the anti-heal component first and the rest of the item later. An 800 gold Bramble Vest does more in this matchup than a completed item that doesn't touch the bleed.

Don't sit at low health assuming you're safe because you're out of her range. Missing health is her scaling stat and her ultimate covers the map anyway.

Stand near your team. Certain Death [R] does fear the enemies around her target, but that's a small price when the alternative is being the only person there.

Ward your own jungle entrances rather than hers. The ultimate arrives from anywhere, so the useful vision is the vision that tells you she left.

Best Briar Counters

The three answers here are an attack speed slow, a damage reflector and a reset button, which cover the three different ways a Briar fight actually gets lost.

Nasus Turns Off the Frenzy

Wither [W] slows move speed and attack speed at once (from 700 range), and Blood Frenzy is made of exactly those two things. One cast takes the chase and the damage out of the ability she just spent, and it comes back on a cooldown short enough to catch the next one.

Nasus only has to survive the early jungle to win this matchup. Fury of the Sands [R] gives him health, armor and magic resist for the window she's committed, Soul Eater [Passive] heals him back through the bleed for free, and Spirit Fire [E] shreds the armor she just broke with Head Rush [Q] right back at her.

Rammus Punishes Every Autoattack

Defensive Ball Curl [W] vastly increases his armor and magic resist and returns damage to anything that attacks him. Briar in frenzy is a champion attacking as fast as she can (the single worst thing to do to a curled up Rammus).

Frenzying Taunt [E] then forces her to keep doing it, and it's the rare piece of crowd control that agrees with her frenzy instead of fighting it. Powerball [Q] into Soaring Slam [R] knocks her up and slows her when the fight needs to end, and Spiked Shell [Passive] converts the armor he bought to survive into damage he didn't pay for.

Ekko Undoes the All-In

Chronobreak [R] makes him untargetable, rewinds him to where he stood a few seconds ago, and heals him for a portion of everything he took in between. Certain Death [R] is a long, loud, committed sequence, and Chronobreak [R] deletes the whole sequence rather than surviving it.

Before that he simply refuses to be caught. Timewinder [Q] pokes from over a thousand units away, Parallel Convergence [W] gives him a shield and a slow field to fight inside, and Phase Dive [E] moves him after her leap has already been spent. He answers her with timing rather than stats (and her stats get better as the fight goes on).

Itemizing Against Briar

Every point of health Briar gets back comes from one bleed, and everything she does to you arrives as physical basic attacks:

Bramble Vest is the correct first buy for anyone she has to walk up to, since it applies grievous wounds the moment she attacks and doesn't need you to hit her back. Executioner's Calling does the same job for ranged champions and for anyone dealing physical damage from a distance. Frozen Heart cuts the attack speed of nearby champions (the frenzy itself), and Randuin's Omen slows her hard enough to end a chase she was supposed to win.